As crops for our winter one-block feast get bigger, we’re getting serious about the payoff: dinner! And to go with all the vegetable-centric dishes we’ve been dreaming up, we’ve gotta have good bread and butter.

Wheat we know about—we grew it for making beer. As for the cow, we don’t have her just yet, but we’re working on the details.
I kid you not: we’re looking into going in on a “cow share” so we can get good local milk and cream. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, we’re experimenting making butter with cream from the store.

I’ve tried making butter in little jars with preschoolers. The idea is they shake and shake the cream, and after awhile, it forms a dab of wonderfully sweet butter and some sweet buttermilk, and then they understand where butter comes from, and get to slather it on a cracker, and become lifetime supporters of the dairy industry. Right?

As it turns out, their hot little hands warm up the cream so it doesn’t clump into butter, their wrists tire out, and pretty soon, you have a lot of moms shaking jars.

In fact there’s a much easier way to go: a food processor.

Just pour in the cream, and let ‘er rip.

In a couple of minutes, voilà—the cream separates into
buttermilk and little clumps of butter that look like fluffy scrambled
eggs, then the clumps form a bigger mass of butter

Next you pour everything into a strainer and squeeze the rest of the milk from the butter. This just takes a few minutes.

The butter is incredibly sweet and fresh tasting—and no tedious shaking required. You can use the milk in any recipe where you’d use plain milk—maybe some good homemade bread.

P.S. If you want to make butter this way with kids, just be sure to keep their fingers away from the sharp food processor blade.

Sweet homemade butter

MAKES 1 cup butter and 1 cup sweet buttermilk TIME 10 minutes

Here’s your chance to ignore all those rules you ever learned about not overbeating whipping cream. Commercial butter has small amounts of culture added, so when you make your own, it tastes extra sweet and fresh.

1 pt. whipping cream
Kosher salt (optional)

1. Whirl cream in a food processor until it separates into buttermilk and clumps of butter that look like fluffy scrambled eggs, then keep whirling until butter forms bigger clumps; this takes 1 to 2 minutes total.

2. Set a fine strainer over a bowl. Pour milk and butter into strainer and let drain briefly. Squeeze butter with your hands to extract remaining milk (it’s okay if there’s a little left).

3. Turn butter into another bowl and stir in salt to taste, if you like.

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Westphoria explores the innovations and lifestyle trends of the 13 Western states, covering food, drink, design, arts and culture, and the dreamers who live here. To contact the editor, westphoria@sunset.com